Portrait of the week: Tory sleaze, NHS jabs and Elon Musk’s shares

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NHS staff in England will have to be fully vaccinated against Covid by the spring. Britain had ordered 250,000 courses of a Pfizer antiviral pill available from early 2022 shown to cut the risk of hospitalisation or death from Covid by 89 per cent. Britain approved another antiviral pill, developed by Merck, and ordered 480,000 courses. In the seven days up to the beginning of this week, 1,185 people had died with coronavirus, bringing the total of deaths (within 28 days of testing positive) to 141,743. (In the previous week deaths had numbered 1,097.) Numbers remaining in hospital stayed at about 9,000. Rolls-Royce gained the backing of private investors and the government to develop small modular reactors to produce nuclear energy. Lionel Blair, the dancer and television performer, died aged 92.

Stephen Barclay, the Cabinet Office minister, expressed regret in parliament that the government had the week before supported a proposal to block, until a review of the standards system had been carried out, the suspension of Owen Paterson after a finding by the parliamentary standards commissioner that he had exercised ‘paid advocacy’. It ended up with Tory MPs whipped into voting for the wheeze only to find humiliatingly the next morning that the government had reversed its policy because it looked so bad and Mr Paterson had applied for the position of Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead. A by-election will be on 16 December. The opposition said the government was corrupt. It pressed a doctrine that being an MP was a job and MPs should have no other.

On one day 853 migrants crossed the Channel, bringing the total for the year to about 21,000; French authorities reported saving 400 from drowning, but one died and one was missing.